


All of the Cooking

by nagi_schwarz



Series: The Oppenheimer Effect [44]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Crossover, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:30:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7231969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompt: "Stargate Multiverse, Evan Lorne, Even a kitchen professional can cut himself."</p><p>Tyler experiences his first Thanksgiving on the commune. Tyler POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All of the Cooking

Tyler still couldn't get over the fact that Evan had grown up on a commune outside of San Francisco. Tina and Sasha had begged him to bring back souvenirs from the city ( _For the Pride, Tyler!_ ), and he'd been pretty excited when he saw the Golden Gate Bridge as the plane was coming in to land, but Evan hadn't been kidding when he said he lived outside the city. He also hadn't been kidding when he said his family did everything together.  
  
When Cam, JD, Evan, and Tyler stepped through the arrivals gate, a mighty cheer rose up. There were posters and signs and it looked like twice as many people as who'd been at the adoption gathered there. Tyler was immediately swept into a hug by Bobbie, and someone put a flower crown on his head, and then Natalia was hugging him and kissing him, and when Tyler finally reoriented himself, he was crammed onto an honest-to-goodness VW bus with a bunch of other kids (Mikey and Gabby got to sit closest to him) and he had no idea where Cam, JD, and Evan were. On one of the other buses, maybe?  
  
The kids plied him with questions about what it was like in Colorado and had he thought about his soul name yet?  
  
(Hearing people call Evan Bluebell was never not going to be funny, Tyler was sure of it.)  
  
But he looked around at all these loud, bright, colorful people and wondered how Evan had possibly ever been one of them. The brightest, most colorful things about Evan were his art and his chore charts (carefully color-coded so everyone could tell at a glance what their chores were). Had he ever been this loud, this easy with laughter and smiles? Tyler had always imagined that even as a kid, Evan had had perfectly-combed hair, perfectly-ironed clothes, and spit-shined shoes. More than Cam, who'd grown up in a military family, Evan was meant to be a soldier (Tyler was still a bit baffled at how Shep had survived as a soldier, with his slouchiness and his crazy hair, which Cam and Evan said he'd had since flight school).  
  
But Evan was pretty free with the hugs, once Tyler thought about it, and he was a lot less uptight about things like feelings and crying. Tyler had assumed it was because Evan had been in therapy the longest, but maybe he'd always been like that.  
  
Tyler was a little disappointed to see the city fade away, but then he could see the ocean, and in the distance were fields and orchards and a cluster of houses. It was like a medieval village. It was pretty.  
  
The buses parked on a gravel drive, and Tyler was swept along in the mass exodus of children toward a house. In the distance, the Golden Gate Bridge was barely visible, but Tyler could also hear the ocean.  
  
What followed was actually a lot more familiar than Tyler would have expected, given the psychedelic paint job on the buses and the sheer amount of flowers in everyone's hair. Bobbie began barking orders, and everyone was a whirlwind of activity, showing Tyler to his room - Cam, JD, and Evan had a room of their own - and setting up tables on the meadow in the middle of the houses and fetching plates and cups and silverware to set the tables and cooking.

All of the cooking.  
  
Apparently the cooks on the commune - Bobbie, Nana, Evan, Sookie (who was visiting from where she lived in Connecticut) - didn't have one kitchen, but every single kitchen in the houses surrounding the meadow was fair game. So Tyler helped the kids set the tables (JD had been drafted to held move tables and chairs and someone had given Cam their baby to hold) and Evan and the cooks dashed back and forth across the clearing, checking on pots and stoves and ovens. It reminded Tyler of Casa Atlantica, on a much bigger scale. He didn't mind the noise and the controlled chaos and the flowers in his hair, because everyone was so, so nice.  
  
The cutest part, Tyler thought, was the way the littlest kids followed Evan around, holding wooden spoons for him and calling him "Bluebell!"   
  
Nana was in charge of the pasta, Bobbie was in charge of the vegetables, Sookie was in charge of the desserts, and Evan was in charge of the tofu, and the smells coming out of the kitchens were really, really good, and Tyler was pretty excited for dinner (if dinner was this awesome, what would actual Thanksgiving be like?) and then one of the little kids started to cry. And another, and another, like falling dominoes.  
  
Cam was alarmed when the baby he was holding started to cry as well, and the baby's mother immediately came to soothe it.  
  
"First blood, Bluebell!" Sookie cried, looking triumphant.  
  
Evan stepped hurriedly out of the kitchen, trailing a whole bunch of crying kids.  
  
"It's okay," he was saying over and over and over again. "JD, do you have any superglue?"  
  
"Did you cut yourself?" JD asked.  
  
Evan nodded. "Yeah. Not enough for stitches, but I'll need some glue."  
  
"Glue?" Bobbie echoed, horrified.  
  
"It's the same as the liquid skin they use in the ER these days," Evan said. "Keeps the wound sealed. Less likely to scar."  
  
JD conferred with some of the other commune denizens, and eventually one of them produced a toolbox with a tube of superglue in it, and JD cleaned and sealed the cut on Evan's finger. Once the blood was gone, all of the little kids insisted on kissing it better, so Evan held his hand out and submitted to their medical assistance.  
  
"And to think," Sookie said in mock-disapproval, "that _you_ are a kitchen professional."  
  
"Says the other kitchen professional," Evan shot back, looking pointedly at the bandages on Sookie's burned fingertips.  
  
Sookie kissed him on the cheek and said, "You know I only respect your culinary skills."  
  
"Thanks," Evan said wryly.  
  
Once all the kids were calmed down and assured that Bluebell wasn't dying, Evan returned to his duties in the kitchen.  
  
"So," Tyler asked Sookie, "if this is what dinner is like tonight, what's dinner like on Thanksgiving?"  
  
"Honey," Sookie said, "this is our Thanksgiving dinner. On the actual night of Thanksgiving, we help out at one of the food kitchens in the city. So eat up tonight and be ready to work damn hard tomorrow. And don't call it Thanksgiving. That's a dishonest historical revisionist term. This is the fall harvest festival. We're enjoying the benefits of the harvest and getting ready to put food up for winter. You ever canned apples?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Get ready to learn." Sookie patted him on the cheek and bustled back into one of the kitchens.  
  
Tyler watched her go and was pretty sure he knew exactly how Evan had fit in here growing up.  
  
And then someone gave him a baby to hold, and he had to figure out how to eat one-handed that night.


End file.
